AUSTRALIAN Prime Minister Tony Abbott says the NSW bushfires were not linked to climate change. Was it the 11-year-old boys? No. It was the military firing ordnance that started the State Mine fire. But they all said it was global warming. Were those experts wrong? Al Gore says not. He says anyone who says the bushfires aren’t a result of global warming is like a fool who believed smoking wasn’t harmful:

“For 40 years the tobacco companies were able to persuade pliant politicians within their grip to tell the public what they wanted them to tell them, and for 40 years the tragedy continued.

“And bushfires can occur naturally and do, but the science shows clearly that when the temperature goes up and when the vegetation and soils dry out, then wild fires become more pervasive and more dangerous. That’s not me saying it, that’s what the scientific community says.”

He went on to accuse those who express the loudest doubts about whether humans are contributing to climate change of “doing exactly the same thing that the tobacco industry did after the Surgeon General’s report came out” linking smoking to cancer. “They hired actors and dressed them up as doctors and gave them scripts” saying that smoking isn’t harmful. Today, said Gore, “carbon polluters” are paying for climate change doubters to say similar things.